Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (41 page)

In March, then, the Cabinet authorized Cripps to proceed to India to negotiate with political leaders there on the basis of a substantial new plan (the details of which were not immediately made public). Under this, a constituent assembly would be established after the war so that India could move forward to self-government. No province would be forced to join the new arrangement that emerged – this amounted to a concession of the principle of Pakistan – and questions of war strategy would be kept in British hands until the close of hostilities.
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‘We have resigned ourselves to fighting our utmost to defend India in order, if successful, to be turned out’, commented Churchill mordantly.
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Roosevelt chose his moment to send Churchill a long telegram comparing the problems of the United States between 1783 and 1789 to contemporary India, which Churchill reprinted in his memoirs with a sarcastic comment: ‘This document is of high interest because it illustrates the difficulties of comparing situations in different centuries and scenes where almost every material fact is totally different’.
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Smuts expressed concern that the plan left open the possibility of partition, but Curtin and Mackenzie King both expressed their pleasure at the proposals.
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In India – in the absence of exact details of the British position – reaction to the Cripps mission ranged from warm welcome to angry scepticism. Sir Ramaswami Mudaliar, a prominent member of the Viceroy’s Council, took a pessimistic view. ‘Winston must have been so preoccupied with war that he succumbed to C.’s pressure,’ he told Reginald Coupland. ‘C. a dubious choice because, when in India in 1939, he was thought to be in Nehru’s pocket, and it is said that Jinnah wrote to Winston that, whoever came, it mustn’t be C. Yet not such a bad choice
if
he brings concessions to the Moslems.’
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The tensions inherent in the mission were evident to journalists, who asked Cripps, after he had arrived in Delhi, about his ‘sharp differences’ with Churchill over India. ‘I and Mr Churchill absolutely agree’, he affirmed. To laughter, one reporter shot back, ‘Which of you has changed?’
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Yet, if anyone could complete the task, it was Cripps. From a wealthy background, he had succeeded brilliantly as a barrister, which provided his route into politics. Having abandoned his youthful Conservative leanings, he was appointed Solicitor-General under the second Labour government and stayed loyal to the party in the split of 1931. He then swung violently to the left and was expelled from Labour soon before the outbreak of war, serving as an independent MP before his return to the fold in 1945. There was little love lost between him and Churchill, but the latter nonetheless appointed him to the Moscow embassy, once observing that ‘he was a lunatic in a country of lunatics and it would be a pity to move him’.
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As a teetotaller and vegetarian, Cripps had a reputation for ‘quirkiness, extreme austerity and cold aloofness’, although he could also demonstrate a lively sense of humour.
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Hitler told his inner circle that he preferred ‘the undisciplined swine’ Churchill as an adversary to the ascetic, ‘drawing-room Bolshevist’ Cripps. ‘From Churchill one may finally expect that in a moment of lucidity – it’s not impossible – he’ll realise that the Empire’s going inescapably to ruin, if the war lasts another two or three years. Cripps, a man without roots, a demagogue and a liar, would pursue his sick fancies although the Empire were to crack at every corner.’
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Goebbels, for his part, thought that the Cripps mission was a cunning plan to pacify India via divide and rule: ‘It is quite clear that this mess has been cooked up in Churchill’s kitchen.’
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Cripps spent three weeks in India cajoling the party leaders to accept the scheme that he had brought with him. At one point the agreement seemed tantalizingly close even though, early on, Gandhi referred to the offer of self-government after the war as ‘a post-dated cheque’. (Some wag of a journalist added ‘on a failing bank’.)
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After the mission broke down, Cripps commented that ‘Gandhi was anything but a saint and had determined to wreck the negotiations from the beginning. He had succeeded.’
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Others placed the blame elsewhere. Even before the final collapse in April, ‘high-placed Americans were angrily saying that Churchill had butted in to prevent a reasonable settlement!’
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The truth was more complex. Certainly, both Amery and (especially) Churchill lost confidence in Cripps, feared that he might be exceeding his brief, and began to communicate with Linlithgow behind his back. The involvement of Colonel Louis Johnson, Roosevelt’s personal representative in India, complicated things further. But there was no single decisive and wrecking Churchillian intervention. Perhaps the most crucial barrier to agreement was the suspicion that the Congress leaders felt towards Linlithgow (who for his part did not trust Cripps). They did not believe that, once they had been admitted to a new, more thoroughly Indianized Viceroy’s Council, the Viceroy himself would allow them meaningful power. Nehru recalled that: ‘During the Cripps-Congress negotiations, I accepted some impossible things but I and those who were with me, found out very soon that those in power in Britain still possessed the mind and mentality of the Victorian period and I came to a definite conclusion that it was impossible to arrive at any settlement with the British rulers.’
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Political weakness had forced Churchill to accept the initiative of the Cripps mission and he had clearly been discomfited by being driven away from his diehard position. He thus bore the news of the breakdown, he recalled in his memoirs, ‘with philosophy’.
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The outcome for him was not without advantage. As Cripps’s official biographer remarks perceptively, ‘It is clear that, spared the necessity of going through with the Cripps offer, what was now uppermost in the Prime Minister’s mind was the effect upon American opinion of having made it.’
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In other words, there was a propaganda benefit in having made an apparently generous proposal and having had it turned down. Furthermore, a little of the shine had now been taken off Cripps’s halo. As Amery commented when the mission was first planned, ‘I am by no means sure [. . .] that Winston doesn’t think it a good thing to send off this dangerous young rival on the errand of squaring the circle in India.’
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The problem of India remained. After the fall of Tobruk in North Africa in June, Churchill faced a vote of no confidence in Parliament (which was defeated overwhelmingly). In Nehru’s contention, the ‘real explanation’ for British military setbacks was ‘Empire’ and the remedy for them was ‘the complete liquidation of that Empire’.
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On 8 August 1942 the All-India Congress Committee passed a resolution calling on the British to ‘Quit India’ and launched a new wave of civil disobedience. Forewarned, the British acted swiftly, arresting Gandhi, Nehru and other Congress leaders the next day. Riots erupted all over the country, Europeans were attacked, and railways were sabotaged.
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At the end of the month, Linlithgow told Churchill, ‘I am engaged here in meeting by far the most serious rebellion since that of 1857’.
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Subhas Chandra Bose, the extremist leader who had broken with Congress and established a Free India Centre in Berlin, congratulated the rebels in a propaganda broadcast, and mocked Churchill for visiting Stalin in Moscow. Britain, he said, would ‘debase herself to any extent and stoop to any humiliation, so long as she can retain her hold over India. That is why Mr Winston Churchill, the high priest of imperialism, the arch-enemy of Indian nationalism and the sworn opponent of all forms of Socialism, swallowed his imperialist pride and presented himself at the gates of the Kremlin.’
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The swift and brutal British reaction ensured that peace was restored in India by the autumn. Thousands were killed or wounded and multitudes were imprisoned. On several occasions mobs were machine-gunned from the air.
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According to the Cabinet Secretary’s notebook Churchill observed:

Indian show-down v. satisfactory. Recruiting v. favourable. Congress shown unable to move the masses – a great flop. They have come out as a revolutionary movement: influenced or working with Japanese: and have failed. Shows that Congress don’t represent India – only Congress caucus and Hindu priesthood.
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According to Amery, ‘From this he rambled on to the suggestion that it would really pay us to take up the cause of the poor peasant and confiscate the rich Congressman’s lands and divide them up.’
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Labour ministers made remarks on similar lines. Churchill was surprised to learn that there was no inheritance tax in India and the Cabinet agreed that the Viceroy should be asked to put forward some proposals.
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Amery, aware that many of these questions were in fact now the responsibility of the Provinces, and eager ‘to get on with the real business’, sat silent.
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It was a telling moment. In the face of large-scale violence, the British government had taken note of India’s enormous social divisions and made a vague, not especially well-informed, resolution to do something about them. But after further discussion over the next weeks it was decided it would be too expensive. There could be no question of spending money on Indian social reform ‘any more than on Canadian social reform’, Amery wrote.
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Equally telling was the minute Churchill wrote about Sir Ramaswami Mudaliar and the Maharaja Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, both of whom had earlier been invited to represent India at the War Cabinet as ‘a generous gesture to loyal Indians’ and who arrived in Britain in September. ‘Though I shall naturally invite them to attend our Monday meetings on general war affairs, it must not be assumed that I shall feel able to invite them to Meetings when Indian affairs are to be discussed’, Churchill warned his colleagues. ‘We have already had several such meetings, and may have more, at which the presence of Indian representatives would be highly embarrassing.’
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They, certainly, felt the difficulties of their own position. Churchill was due to make a statement in the Commons on the disturbances on 10 September. The day before, Mudaliar and the Jam Saheb were taken to be photographed with him in the Downing Street garden. While they were there, Amery asked Churchill if he had read the note he had sent him in preparation for the statement. The Prime Minister reacted angrily, saying he had read it but that he would speak on his own lines. ‘If we ever have to quit India we shall quit it in a blaze of glory, and the chapter that shall be ended then will be the most glorious chapter of that country, not merely in relation to the past but equally in relation to the future, however distant that may be. That will be my statement on India tomorrow.’ No one else could get a word in edgeways, and when the Indians went back to their hotel they considered quitting and going home if the statement was as bad as they feared it would be.
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In the end, Amery’s influence prevailed to some extent; Churchill toned down his public statement. In private, though, the Prime Minister remained as intransigent as ever, ‘I hate Indians’, he suddenly burst out, ‘They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’
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Churchill began his modified Commons statement by saying that the declaration of principles that formed the basis of the Cripps mission ‘must be taken as representing the settled policy of the British Crown and Parliament’. In other words, the government stood by its offer. But, Churchill pointed out, Cripps’s ‘good offices’ had been ‘rejected by the Indian Congress Party’, which was at any rate unrepresentative even of the Hindu masses. Furthermore:

The Congress Party has now abandoned in many respects the policy of nonviolence which Mr Gandhi has so long inculcated in theory, and has come into the open as a revolutionary movement designed to paralyse the communications by rail and telegraph and generally to promote disorder, the looting of shops and sporadic attacks upon the Indian police, accompanied from time to time by revolting atrocities – the whole having the intention or at any rate the effect of hampering the defence of India against the Japanese invader who stands on the frontiers of Assam and also upon the eastern side of the Bay of Bengal. It may well be that these activities by the Congress Party have been aided by Japanese fifth-column work on a widely extended scale and with special direction to strategic points.

Towards the end of his statement, he referred to the continued high levels of recruitment to the Indian army: ‘It is fortunate, indeed, that the Congress Party has no influence whatever with the martial races, on whom the defence of India apart from British Forces largely depends.’ And in his concluding remarks, he noted that large numbers of reinforcements had reached India and that ‘the numbers of white soldiers now in that country, though very small compared with its size and population, are larger than at any time in the British connection’. Therefore, ‘the situation in India at this moment gives no occasion for undue despondency or alarm’.
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